Valerie

📚I love the depth of your thoughts.❣️📚

Interesting my public library system is being flooded with books from Pro-Israel/Zionist Baker Publishing, with 20+ new titles coming in Sept 2026. They publish titles such as Israel Matters (McDermott), which provides a defense of a "New Christian Zionism", and On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel's Best Friend (Weber). From About: “serve the diverse interests and concerns of evangelical readers” Now why would a public library system be doing this?

I was interviewed on Devil’s Advocate, where my arguments about Ukraine, Iran, China and the US were challenged. If Iran faces an existential threat and must defend itself, does Ukraine also have the right of self-defence? If Taiwan wants self-determination, why shouldn’t the West support its secession? Do great powers have the right to a sphere of interest along their borders, or a sphere of influence? What is perceived as normatively justified may prove disastrous in the context of great power politics. glenndiesen.substack.com/p/world-at-war…

"You can only come to the morning through the shadows." 📖Tolkien

My dog after eating my philosophy book

❤️

This!

You are not the darkness you have endured. You are the light that survived.

“I love the depth of your wisdom.” ~ 📖 ~

"Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable." 📖Kafka

"If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them." 📖George Orwell

"A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books." 📖Andrei Tarkovsky

"The book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one which makes you think." 📖Harper Lee

"The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant." 📖Robespierre

“Peace is always beautiful.” ~ Walt Whitman

"Books only have two smells. The smell of a new book, which is good, and the smell of an old book, which is even better." —Ray Bradbury

Tolstoy said it best

Russian author Leo Tolstoy, 1897

meet the librarian strict, silent, and slightly judgmental.

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!" ― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice